NFC: It’s about more than just payments

Posted on by adntaylor
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Yesterday, Google announced its NFC payment system: Google Wallet.

Reading 90% of the articles about this subject over the past few years (aside from the plethora of “Will / won’t the next iPhone have NFC” stories), you could be forgiven for thinking that NFC was just a way of putting a payment card in your phone.

Mobile contactless payment is a great piece of functionality and one which many of us (myself included) have been longing for but it’s hardly new: Japan has had it for years, with the FeLiCa system embedded in most handsets. It’s well-liked, trusted and very broadly accepted. Over here, the main hurdles have been political rather than technical.

Payment is a fascinating story on its own and it’s very tough to predict who will come up with the dominant solution, but we decided to write a series of articles about some other aspects of NFC to demonstrate how it’s capable of so much more.

What we have been pondering is: assuming that phones have NFC capabilities, what does that allow you to achieve outside of the holy trinity of:

  1. Payments
  2. Transport / event tickets
  3. Vouchers / loyalty cards.

Some of these other use cases are well-known today, such as key tags for access control systems (door locks), and others will become better known soon, such as NFC-based check-ins for location-based services such as FourSquare.

It’s our belief that NFC is far from another gimmick and has the potential to actually change the way we interact with the physical world in a profound fashion.

This series of articles will dig further into these areas and look at what can be done, the challenges faced and some possible ways that they could be achieved.

What’s coming up?

Coming soon, we look at how NFC can improve the top-up method for pre-pay mobile phones, help people with hearing and sight difficulties, stop your washing machine annoying you, make your trips to shops and restaurants faster, improve your product selection experience, share media around the home, expand the functionality of products, improve user interfaces and allow you to build great cross-platform libraries.

But first, it would be slightly crazy of us not to even glance at the world of NFC payments: it’s going to be the most commonly known use for NFC and the main focus of all the companies involved for the next few years.

Continue reading →

Which has the better display, a Droid X or Droid X2 / Atrix?

Posted on by adntaylor
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Motorola have taken some of their phones and nominally upgraded the displays to raise the game towards the level set by the iPhone 4 of >300dpi.

But, as measured by DisplayMate, the original Droid series had one of the best displays in a phone ever seen, with comparably high resolution and better colour reproduction than an iPhone4 display. Was this a display in need of changing?

And has the shift to a qHD Pentile display (540×960) been worthwhile for Motorola; should you buy one?

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Can AMD afford not to develop ARM products?

Posted on by adntaylor
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Some while back, Wolfgang Grüner posted an interesting hypothesis about AMD’s future direction possibly including ARM designs, at Conceivably Tech (original article) and many others have chipped in saying this is either a terrible idea or a great idea.

So, could AMD be about to give up their crown jewels, x86, and jump ship to ARM to compete in the growing smartphone and tablet markets with dozens of other chipset manufacturers?

Well, AMD say no, but had previously been speaking in somewhat coded terms and have followed this up with several very vague comments about no doors being closed. With no permanent CEO in place, it seems unlikely that such a strategic decision could have been made in the past few months but why should (or shouldn’t) AMD consider bringing out an ARM chip in theory, if they haven’t decided this already behind closed doors?

We’ll have a look at if this is a sensible plan or whether they may be trying to buy some time: announcing new ARM products may well hurt their current product offerings and roadmap, yet delivering a whole new CPU architecture on a new instruction set takes a long time and, if they were to have only started recently, they would be some years away from hitting real products.

x86‘s past

In the past, AMD’s main strength has been its x86 licence which has allowed it to run Microsoft’s Windows and the vast library of applications available for that, letting them compete against Intel for the high ASPs, decent margins and good volumes offered in the PC world.

VIA, Cyrix, Rise, IBM, IDT, Transmeta and others who previously sold x86 processors have effectively fallen to the side leaving a virtual duopoly of Intel and AMD; even AMD looked to be on shaky ground until new investors from Saudi Arabia spun off their manufacturing division and Intel paid them $1.25 billion to settle a massive anti-trust legal case.

In recent years, ARM tried to break into the PC market, showing off tiny, low-cost netbook-competitors to little effect. Qualcomm invested large amounts in promoting their SmartBook concept and, again, failed. Why? No O/S. No apps: no Office, no IE, no iTunes, no Photoshop, no Firefox, no Flash.

It didn’t matter what chip you had inside your product: if you released something which looked like a notebook PC, people expected Windows. Linux was not ready for the unwashed masses, as Acer discovered with their first EeePC models, where the Linux ones were sent right back to the stores they were bought from.

But times have changed, with the iPad redefining what was needed from a computing device and with Microsoft announcing that future versions of Windows would run on ARM as well as x86 – the first open, dual-architecture consumer platform in the desktop Windows range. Even Apple are rumoured to be making a switch to ARM so maybe the time is right now?

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On RGBW, Pentile, Sub-pixels and ‘Graininess’ of mobile displays

Posted on by adntaylor
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SID 2011, the world’s leading display conference, features some new, eye-catching 10.1″ tablet displays from Samsung, as announced on Engadget, with a mind-boggling headline resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels, aka twice the resolution (and four times the number of pixels) of a conventional 1280 x 800 panel.

This is an amazing breakthrough and they should be thoroughly congratulated as should, if rumours are true, LG who are also likely set to announce something similar.

Less well-received was the news that this product would see the return of the sub-pixel layout known as Pentile: a trick where, for the sake of increasing perceived resolution and effectively shrinking the pixels, part of the colour information for each pixel is thrown away.

The OLED displays used by many HTC and Samsung handsets used this technique, resulting in many users complaining of a graininess to the screen and jagged edges on text and UI components, just like you’d see on older digital camera displays.

Digital Camera LCD screen showing jagged edges of sub-pixels

Digital Camera LCD screen showing jagged edges caused by RGB Delta sub-pixel layout.

Digital Cameras didn’t actually use Pentile, but often used another layout called RGB Delta, with the red, green and blue arranged in triangles. But why? Well, RGB stripe, the conventional approach for computers and smartphones, has its failings too, particularly when displaying softer, natural content like photographs. The camera makers chose RGB Delta because it was, in fact, better for displaying the pictures and that was the top priority.

So should you want a new Pentile LCD display in your next tablet computer, even if it has a high resolution? It’s clearly not a simple answer so that’s what we’re here to dig into.

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May Apple phase-out x86 in favour of ARM for laptops?

Posted on by adntaylor
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Charlie Demerjian of SemiAccurate posted a fascinating article with rumours that Apple may be switching from Intel’s x86 processors to their own ARM models across their laptop range as soon as 2013.

Many commenters have been highly skeptical of this, verging on the angry denial.

Suicidal

After all, surely, that would be suicidal for Apple; even today’s best ARM chips are many times slower than Intel’s Sandy Bridge in terms of raw performance and it’s incredibly hard to shift all today’s software over to a new architecture, especially if the new platform is too slow to emulate the old one. Fancy running Photoshop CS5 in an emulator? No? Me neither.

Add in the fact that there are thousands of peripherals like printers and scanners which require drivers that are not available for Mac OS on ARM; should users just dump these?

So, would it be suicidal? Well, maybe and maybe not. In response to this, I posted the following answer on Quora and thought it would be interesting to post here with some additional detail.

In short, I believe not only that it’s plausible but that it’s actually hard to find solid arguments as to why it wouldn’t happen.

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Will dual-core phones rock my world? Perhaps not.

Posted on by adntaylor
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A few days ago, a colleague asked me about dual core phones. He was lucky enough to have played with some of the newest mobile devices which used dual core CPUs and was fully expecting to be blown away, yet he left feeling somewhat disappointed. Why, he asked, did these not feel a generation quicker than last year’s phones? Was Android not making use of the second core yet?

As often happens, the question is not simple enough to answer in a 1 minute conversation, let alone a 140 character tweet. So this seemed like a good opportunity to try out our new blog and post an answer. Continue reading →

Welcome to Expiance

Posted on by adntaylor
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Welcome to the Expiance blog!

Here, a group of people from the mobile industry will be posting our thoughts about the world of technology, sharing interesting news, creating analytics and deep diving into some of the technologies which are changing peoples’ lives.

We’re neither consultants nor analysts so we are not constrained by the fear of upsetting people. Nor do we need to be conservative to avoid massive lawsuits from investors (take our advice at your own risk), so what you’ll read here we hope will be a great combination of common sense, detailed analysis, the savvy of what only insiders know and some thorough technical insight from people who love technology and what it can allow people to do.

Here, you’ll hear the story exactly how it is. No hidden agendas nor sponsors to appease.

We very much hope you enjoy reading what we write and will add us to your bookmarks and Twitter feed!